gh-142527: Docs: Clarify that random.seed() discards the sign of an integer input...

If *a* is an integer, the sign of *a* is discarded in the C source code. Clarify this behavior to prevent foot guns, where a common use case might naively assume that flipping the sign will produce different sequences (e.g. for a train/test split of a synthetic data generator in machine learning).

Co-authored-by: Adam Turner <9087854+AA-Turner@users.noreply.github.com>

diff --git a/Doc/library/random.rst b/Doc/library/random.rst
index 4e55e301b89095faac0765eee985d14ca9bc06df..6bddf575a809a18cef32664ee317b84640f0b65d 100644 (file)
--- a/Doc/library/random.rst
+++ b/Doc/library/random.rst
@@ -78,7 +78,7 @@ Bookkeeping functions
    instead of the system time (see the :func:`os.urandom` function for details
    on availability).
 
-   If *a* is an int, it is used directly.
+   If *a* is an int, its absolute value is used directly.
 
    With version 2 (the default), a :class:`str`, :class:`bytes`, or :class:`bytearray`
    object gets converted to an :class:`int` and all of its bits are used.